Framing starts

So our Realtor emailed us one morning and sent us a video showing how they had started the basement framing!  We were pretty excited and after dinner we hopped in the car to see for ourselves.  Imagine our surprise when we saw this!

Sorry for the lighting conditons, I tried!

So it looks like they put up the first floor in a day!  Very exciting!  I am trying to take photos from the same spot each time, which isn't so great during sunset.   Most of our visits are early in the day so this shouldn't be too much of a problem going forward!

Our wood has arrived!

A special shout out to our Realtor Patty for grabbing this picture for us!

Hopefully framing will begin soon!  So excited!

Foundation and Earth

Not much of an update here, but we have a foundation!   

Our future basement!

The houses on our street in the direction of to The Cove are also progressing quite nicely.  Now we are ready for framing!

They moved some dirt around!

While the picture may not show much, they started work on our house!   We were out of town, but it was wonderful to check our email after we got off the plane to see that the building process has begun!   It was a few days earlier than they had told us, but that is welcome news.   I can't wait to see the foundation!  

View from the front of the house

I really need to remember to take photos in landscape!

We hope to get down to the site weekly to check out the progress.  

Pre-Construction Meeting

Due to our schedules prior to construction, we had our pre-construction meeting within our 30 day change window, and actually two days after our flooring and Guardian appointments.   The nice thing about this is that all of our changes were really fresh in our head, and we had a fun conversation with our Realtor and Sales Associate about our choices.   The unfortunate thing was that since the meetings happened so close together we were the only one with the paperwork for all of those changes.

Our PM is great! They seem to have a PM for the different sections, so our PM has built all of the Elizabeths in Potomac Shores.   They had a lot of great advice for us, and answered a lot of our questions about our grading around our house.    They also explained that two houses next to us are going up around the same time, so that will limit the amount of construction we will have to live with on our side of the street.  Though our sales associate said they are building NV homes on the other side of our street at some point, and they have yet to sell the lot next to us, so it won't be that quiet!

I also knew that we would over time be installing custom shelving for the pantry and a few of the closets so I asked if they could put the same type of support setup pre-drywall that they do for the kitchen in these areas to support our installation, which they said they could do.  I am now on a mission to decide what type of units I will be using so that I know what height to tell them when the time comes.

We also asked a lot of grading questions, as one of the first things on our list of things to do after we move in is to determine what do do with our outdoor space.  We really want to add a patio and/or a deck, and they had recommendations of places to go to start those conversations.

I'm actually pretty glad that we are so busy this month, it will make this long waiting period go by quickly!  I can't wait to get started!

Guardian Appointment

For those who are not indoctrinated into the Ryan Blog-verse, the Guardian appointment is the time you decide where you place the wiring of your house.  This does not include the electricity, but outlets and things can be effected by your choices.

We decided early on that if we were going to have our TVs mounted in certain areas, and we would rather have those pre-wired than to go back and change them.   If we change our minds on the locations, we will have to put nice artwork there!

Guardian offers so many options for wiring, some were not things we were considering, like the house-wide vacuum system.  It looked cool, but it just didn't seem necessary!   We also passed on the house audio system they offered.   If you have been in a model home recently, they have a multi-zone audio system installed, and it's pretty cool honestly.  It obviously is not a free feature, so I am guessing most people do not install one.  We seriously considered it, but I will say Guardian was really honest about when a system like that would be used and we thought it didn't meet our needs exactly.

To expand upon that, when you buy these sort of packages, you relinquish a certain level of control.  For example, they offered 3 types of speakers that they would install, which I do think were reasonable priced, but that means you cannot shop around for other options, and there are a lot of speaker brands out there!   The same with the house-wide audio system.  If we both listened to a lot of music or NPR while we were moving about the house, that would be ideal in my opinion.  The same song or show would be playing and you wouldn't need to deal with an iPod and headphone cords everywhere...but we were installing speakers and things more for movie and sports watching, so playing the same thing through multiple zones in the house didn't seem like something we were ever going to do at least not very often.

So we ended up getting pre-wire in several areas of the house, and we will install the speakers over time.  We also liked this option, because it did not make a whole lot of sense to wrap things like that into a mortgage.  Guardian was helpful with us being creative on how we want to use certain areas of the house, and we ended up having a lot of pre-wired areas.   In the end we think we won't regret that, but in this era with so many wireless options it did give us pause!    We did have a lot of data lines installed for smart tvs, since we know now that the Roku we have that is wired is much more reliable than the wireless one.  In the end if we don't use it it won't be the end of the world.  We really only have one data port in the home office as we expect to use our devices wirelessly most of the time.

If anyone is going through this process too, let me know what you decided to do!  I felt like this was the hardest decision given how fast technology changes.

Flooring and Tile!

This was the meeting I was the most excited about, finalizing our flooring choices and tile.  Because of concerns of using up too much vacation time early on during this process, we decided to combine the flooring and wiring appointments to the same day.  I will post about our wiring appointment later, this post just focuses on the flooring meeting.

We drove out to T.A.C. flooring in Manassas, which had a great and fun showroom.   I would have loved to pick out choices for houses all day!  We got through the meeting in seemingly record time, which almost felt a little unsettling!   Right before the meeting we viewed a house model with a master bathroom that had white cabinets and we decided to change our original choice to the white cabinets that match kitchen and laundry room.  Houzz.com also helped us visualize a few things, so I recommend an account there for anyone who needs ideas.

We first started in the kitchen, and we went in there knowing the hardwood color, type and that we wanted it throughout the first floor.  So that was very easy!    We chose the Brown Bear white oak flooring to coordinate with the Rushmore Square Painted Linen cabinets and New Caledonia Granite.

Our kitchen choices!

Next we chose the master bath.    I handed the heavy lifting over to the hubby for this, because while we agreed on the look we wanted, he had a much better eye for it and could take the tile samples and really see how it would work.  I'm very excited with how it will come out!   

We also chose our kitchen backsplash.  We don't have a granite portion vertically on the walls, we will only have tile, which is nice.  I have become obsessed with the glass tiling that is cut in the shape of bricks, so that is what we chose.

This color is a tad darker than our choice, but the same size of tile.  This wall was still under construction, which is why you see the red portions!

This glass came in a ton of colors.  We chose Top Hat, the 4th from the left.   

It was hard for me to trust the process, I have such a hard time visualizing things from samples!  I am very excited to see how this comes out though!

Sorry my picture taking skills were a bit off that morning!  I forgot my real camera!

It may be a bit difficult to see, but we chose a nice dark grey tile for the floors and white tile for the walls with a glass accent to travel from the tub side through to the shower.    Our bathroom granite we chose was the Santa Cecilia Light which we both thought was beautiful and tried to use it where we could!

For the other bathrooms, we chose darker cabinets, the Wyoming Square Cherry Java with Burlywood granite.  We did the minor upgrade to tile there, picking a lighter tile with different accent glass in each shower to change it up.  Our buyer's agent said that the standard tile was actually fine, the minor upgrade we made was not that much so we don't regret our choice there at all.  It was too hard to get pictures of all of our bathroom choices, so you will just have to wait and see!

All the other bathrooms

We kept the standard carpet for the second floor and the basement, but upgraded the padding to the 8 lb. pad.   Since we plan on entertaining family and friends, we picked a darker color for the basement so it would hold up to stains better.   

Second floor carpet on the left, basement carpet on the right.

That was pretty much it.  I did realize at this meeting, that with the speed of all of our decisions, there were a ton of questions I probably didn't ask previously.  I have no idea what our pulls or knobs will look like for example.  I do think (or hope!) that I asked all of the questions that I really needed to know, and things like pulls and knobs can be replaced very easily so I'm not super concerned about minor details.